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1GOOGLE FOR WORK
for Work
The Evolving Role of the CIO
A Google for Work Collection
1GOOGLE FOR WORK
Mobility and the cloud rank as the most critical technologies in the
workplace today. They also transform the role of the CIO as IT becomes
a strategic partner in the business and shifts from enforcer to enabler.
In this Google for Work collection, we harness the collective experience of Google’s SVP for
Technical Infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, and Google’s CIO, Ben Fried, along with other CIOs and
industry leaders. Together, they discuss topics on the mind of every technologist concerned
with workplace innovation:
The power of personal technology. The way we work has changed forever because people
have brought the personal tools and devices they love into the workplace. How can the
enterprise embrace this change to elevate performance, drive innovation and accelerate
business processes?
Moving to the cloud. Urs Hölzle announced across-the-board 10 percent price cuts on
Google’s Compute Engine, setting a new standard for economics in the public cloud. With the
price of computing plummeting and its impact on business agility and innovation, it’s not a
question of if enterprises will move to the cloud, but how.
Security is top-of-mind for IT leaders, for good reason. Google ‘s Director of Security for
Google Apps for Work, Eran Feigenbaum, shares how Google keeps corporate data secure.
Read on to learn about the evolving role of the CIO and how IT can become an agent of
enterprise transformation.
The Google for Work team
Want to continue the discussion?
Contact us now or call us at 855-778-5079.
2CONTENTS
Table of Contents
1 Editorial
3 The evolving role of the CIO
Chat with Ben Fried, Google CIO
6 T he next generation of cloud
Thoughts from Urs Hölzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure at Google
10 Chico’s redesigns customer service and saves $2 million
12 Hot trend: File sharing for the enterprise
14 Securing corporate data in the cloud
By Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security for Google Apps for Work
17 ScottsMiracle-Gro’s formula for transforming business
19 Collaborating when it counts: How Colorado weathered the storm
The evolving role of the CIOChat with Ben Fried, Google CIO
3GOOGLE FOR WORK
When Google CIO Ben Fried talks about his job, he gets
fairly animated. “I’ve been in IT 30-something years,” he
said at Atmosphere Live. “I can’t remember a time when
there was so much change happening at such a rapid
pace in so many parts of the technology landscape.
Mobile, data, the cloud — these and ten other technologies
are all moving at incredible speed.”
What should every CIO understand about today’s IT?The pace of change for IT is driven by employee demand for
consumer technologies, combined with the opportunities
they present for business transformation. Fried makes the
point that we can’t rely on the old change management
cycles. Skilled tech support people, who understand how
to roll out new technology at the speed the tech industry
delivers it, are incredibly important. If you can’t move at the
pace of change, after all, you’ll always lag behind.
While some CIOs may still fear the intrusion of personal
devices and cloud apps into the workplace, Fried sees it dif-
ferently. Technology advancements in the consumer space,
he says, offer infrastructure and development platforms that
give business transformation a major head start, so it can
happen at a much lower cost. Now, “We don’t have to write
the checks that pay for the R&D and the innovation that’s
creating these technologies,” says Fried.
Rather than trying to master every aspect of IT, Fried en-
courages CIOs to focus on solutions that can really make a
difference for their businesses — creating customized, enter-
prise-ready software that builds on consumer technologies.
WATCH THE INTERVIEW WITH BEN FRIED »
Most of your people use the
cloud already. You can help them end the
confusion caused by using an enterprise
tool set that’s completely divergent from
the personal tools they know and love.”
Ben FriedCIO, GOOGLE
WATCH THE VIDEO
4GOOGLE FOR WORK
5GOOGLE FOR WORK
What are the big challenges for CIOs?
In this period of history, the pace of change
continues to increase. “Two guys in a bed-
room can build an app that will be used by a
million people the next day,” says Fried. “That’s
incredibly fast.”
Keeping up with that pace requires being open to cloud
computing. For IT leaders still hesitant to make the shift, Fried
makes two points. “First, it’s not as hard as you may think,”
he says. “Most of your people use the cloud already. You can
help them end the confusion caused by using an enterprise
tool set that’s completely divergent from the personal tools
they know and love.”
The second point? “In the end it’ll make your company bet-
ter,” Fried says. “Moving problems to the cloud means mov-
If you’d told me before I
took this job that I’d be pre-
siding over 9,000 in-house
videoconferencing systems,”
says Fried, “I would have said,
‘What? That’s the CIO’s job?’
But actually, it’s an amazing
source of innovation for us,
and a real point of pride for
the company.”
Here’s a Google example:A couple of years ago, Fried noticed the company was spending a lot of
money on outsourced videoconferencing systems, but they owned all the
technology in-house — so he asked Google engineers to build an in-house
system. The new system was so successful internally that customers who
visited began asking about it, and Chromebox for meetings was born.
ing them out of your mind... it lets you deliver way more in
the areas that are much more important for your business
than these problems that can be solved in the cloud.” For
Fried, that means more time to think about “differentiating
Google, making Google a great place to work and making
Googlers the most productive people in the world.”
That’s how Google defines innovation, but each business is
different. To create a culture that supports innovation and
get a handle on your evolving CIO role, says Fried, you have
to decide what it means with your team, and move forward
from there.
To hear more of Ben Fried’s thoughts on business
transformation and mobility, watch his interview at
Atmosphere Live.
T he next generation of cloudThoughts from Urs Hölzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure at Google
Many of us are only beginning to realize the full magnitude
of recent advances in cloud technology. The topic is often
thought to be synonymous with cloud storage or soft-
ware-as-a-service. However, the cloud today goes beyond
simply moving legacy applications or services off-premis-
es. It enables businesses to transform the way that they
think about technical infrastructure.
Cloud computing offers significant business advantage, according to Urs
Hölzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure at Google. The economics alone de-
mand attention. Hölzle suggests considerable company IT savings through
use of the cloud:
• Not having to build your own on-premise data center
• Avoiding tedious infrastructure management, ceaseless updates and
endless tweaking for bugs
• Built-in scaling and expansion for rapid, efficient, smooth growth
Yes, the cloud’s cost savings are vast and compelling. But as Hölzle em-
phasizes, costs aren’t the most important driver steering companies to the
cloud — innovation is. Google’s success with large-scale cloud computing is
noteworthy not as an isolated instance, but as a vanguard indicator that the
cloud is changing all industries, all of technology. Work on any device, at any-
time, from anywhere in the world: this connected experience, which shapes
so much of consumer technology today, is a product of the cloud.
Seeing these trends, many
people began to ask whether
or not they should move to
the cloud. That question has
changed: It’s not whether they
should move, but how.”
— Urs HölzleSVP Technical Infrastructure, Google
WATCH URS HÖLZLE’S TALK AT ATMOSPHERE LIVE »
6GOOGLE FOR WORK
7
With the cloud, the power to
build new products and features
to delight your customers and win
future customers can be distributed
through your entire business.”
Urs Hölzle,SVP TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE, GOOGLE
WATCH THE VIDEO
7GOOGLE FOR WORK
8GOOGLE FOR WORK
The power of first-class infrastructure“With the cloud, the power to build new products and
features to delight your customers and win future
customers can be distributed through your entire
business. The central IT organization is not a blocker
of progress, but the ultimate enabler,” says Hölzle. Let’s
look at Snapchat, a Google customer, which has millions of users. Just two
years after launching, Snapchat’s users send out 700 million photos and
videos every day. Before the era of cloud computing, supporting that level
of growth with a developer and operations team of just a few people would
have been impossible. A company trying to manage its own infrastructure
at that scale would have been overwhelmed with resource-sapping IT de-
mands. Not so with Google Cloud Platform, which allows their app to scale
with minimal effort from their team.
Another example is Workiva, which handles financial re-
ports for more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500. From
the beginning, the company was built on Google Cloud
Platform, with no IT capital expenditures. Confident in
the cloud, the company didn’t hire system administra-
tors and an operations team, but instead built a new software tool to tackle
that complex data management of financial reporting. No matter what level
of surges and spikes in server traffic (and government deadlines periodically
provoke such spikes), the system scales on demand. The platform resolved
Workiva’s complex data-editing and merging problems so well that it saved
them 3-5 full-time positions in system administration and operations.
As Hölzle states, “Seeing these trends, many people be-
gan to ask whether or not they should move to the cloud.
That question has changed: It’s not whether they should
move, but how.”
Because the velocity of innovation has never been greater, the scale that
companies can achieve in a short period of time is unprecedented. A product
like Angry Birds can reach 50 million users in 35 days. And as Hölzle points
out, it’s no coincidence that Angry Birds is built entirely in the public cloud.
What about security?Google recently published the
updated ISO 27001 certificate and
SOC 2 and SOC 3 Type II audit report,
which are the most widely recognized
and accepted independent security
compliance reports.
A company trying to manage
its own infrastructure at
that scale would have been
overwhelmed with resource-
sapping IT demands. Not so
with Google Cloud Platform...
9GOOGLE FOR WORK
Getting the most cloud bang for your buckIn early 2014 Google introduced a new pricing model, with significant sav-
ings for computing, storage and analytics. There were discounts for on-de-
mand resources and sustained use, and all charged in per-minute incre-
ments, so you could avoid rounded-up bills that didn’t reflect actual use.
As Hölzle declared at Atmosphere Live, “We’ve seen reduced hardware costs
and increased efficiency of our service delivery, and we want to return those
savings to you. As of now, we are cutting prices of Google Compute Engine
by 10 percent across the board. We want to pass our increased efficiency
and lowered hardware costs right back to our customers.”
This isn’t a bland, situational, one-time price cut; this is supportive of
Google’s overarching — and ongoing — philosophy of returning value to its
customers. And actively seeking out that value.
Google has pioneered many of the premier technologies
and systems that underlie distributed computing today.
When developers build on the Cloud Platform, they take advantage of new
advances in computer science that will make their development easier and
cost-efficient, and make their applications perform better. You don’t need
to choose between building something that is going to be able to scale to
support millions of users or building something quickly. You can do both.
And as Hölzle points out, these products and services are implemented at
some of the greenest data centers in the world.
Learn more about Google Cloud Platform
or watch Urs Hölzle’s full Atmosphere
Live talk to hear more about this next
generation of cloud and how it can help
transform your business.
At Google, we’ve worked hard to
minimize the environmental impact of
our services. In fact, when we provide
an active user one month of Google
services, we use less energy than
driving a car one mile. Learn more
Chico’s FAS, a women’s clothing retailer, has more than
1,500 stores in North America. In 2013, it posted over $2.5
billion in sales. We spoke to CIO Eric Singleton, who out-
lined several ways the company has already transformed
customer service and streamlined communication — after
using Google tools for just one year.
“The best way to explain the impact of Google is discussing the things you
see and the things you don’t,” says Singleton. “We’ve had huge changes in
both areas.” For example, customers don’t see that Chico’s teams moved
away from time-consuming email processes in favor of Google Hangouts.
They have no idea that the company saved over $2 million in infrastruc-
ture costs by using Google Apps for Work and Hangouts, instead of
building an expensive satellite support center to connect the Hong Kong
and Florida offices.
The Hong Kong Hangouts experiment, led by industry veteran Alan Mariotti,
VP for Chico’s Technology, changed everything for Chico’s. It ignited a series
of parallel implementations that the company deployed in record time, shift-
ing the culture in the process.
Today, Chico’s customers see a more personalized, responsive experience
every time they shop. As a result of what Chico’s calls its Digital Retail The-
atre™ program, a woman traveling on a business trip can select outfits online,
put them in her shopping cart and find them waiting for her at the nearest
store, along with a few spot-on accessories. When she arrives at the store,
WATCH THE INTERVIEW WITH ERIC SINGLETON »
With traditional enterprise
environments, information
is siloed, leaving a business
to operate as a sum of many
independent parts.
We’re moving away from this toward a
more progressive hybrid cloud model,
with Google at the foundation. In this
new environment, positive feedback
loops accelerate, and we can bring
together multiple solutions and data
sources — all built in the cloud — and
look at our business holistically.”
— Eric SingletonCIO, Chico’s
10GOOGLE FOR WORK
Chico’s redesigns customer service and saves $2 million
11GOOGLE FOR WORK
she’s greeted by intelligent digital signs with localized content, such as the
weather, neighborhood events and time of day. These signs can be produced
in hours instead of days, resulting in both great customer service and time
cost savings for Chico’s.
Chico’s DISCO platform as a service serves as the company’s digital founda-
tion, and it’s written entirely in Go, Google’s programming language. Chico’s
integrated Google Apps for Work throughout, while Chromeboxes and
Google Drive help them deploy the images across all of those digital screens.
We create a phenomenal number of graphics …”
says Singleton, “terabytes of high-resolution files
every year. Our employees have moved them all to
Google Drive. As mundane as this may seem, when
you’re moving that amount of information around the
world, online storage is a huge asset.”
Google BigQuery will allow the company to run predictive models on a
decade’s worth of stored customer data, to understand how customers are
likely to behave in stores, on the website and when using mobile apps. “This
is important,” says Singleton, “because we have four different brands, each
with its own focus, sensibility and loyal following. We have to be constantly
thinking about what they’ll want next from the brands they love.”
Hear more about the innovative thinking
that is transforming retail and redefining
customer service. Watch the Atmosphere
Live interview with Chico’s CIO, Eric
Singleton, and see how your business can
use Google Cloud Platform and Google
Drive for Work.
CHICO’S INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY TABLES
File sharing through sync-and-share platforms is a huge business today, with more than a billion people uploading and sharing files of all kinds. According to Gigaom Re-search analysts, circumstances vary — from individuals uploading personal documents for remote access to “enormous corporate document-management solutions serving thousands of workers involved in critical enter-prise processes.”
You may know Google Drive as a consumer technology that allows you to
store Google Docs, Sheets and Slides to share with others or to access from
other devices. But Drive is much more than that — it’s a secure place where
distributed work teams can collaborate.
Hot trend: File sharing for the enterprise
The size of the market ...
is a testament to how critical
this functionality is in a world
where users have multiple de-
vices and where sharing files
has become the central aspect
of a new computing para-
digm.” — Gigaom Research
SOURCE: GIGAOM RESEARCH, SECTOR ROADMAP:
FILE SYNC-AND -SHARE PLATFORMS, JUL 2014.
GET THE FULL RESEARCH HERE »
12GOOGLE FOR WORK
13GOOGLE FOR WORK
ALL YOUR WORK, SAFE, AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE AND
EASY TO SHARE
Today, companies from around the world — including Crate & Barrel,
Seagate, Tory Burch, HP and Jaguar Land Rover — rely on Drive to help
them innovate, share knowledge and exploit the competitive edge that
comes with speed of execution.
Business customers need flexibility and security, so Google continues to
make upgrades that reflect those needs. With today’s Google Drive, you can
preview over 40 different file types on your mobile device without any addi-
tional software. As a result, adoption of Google Drive is exploding — up 50
million users between June and October 2014, to a total of 240 million users.
At just $10 per user, per month, Google Drive for Work takes things even
further — including the ability to share huge files, up to five terabytes. How
big is 5TB? That’s the amount of data the U.S. Library of Congress stores
every month.
As the threats in the
external environment change,
Google is at the forefront of
preventing, responding and
anticipating.”
— Todd PierceCIO, Genentech
Google has invested significantly in security features that make Google Drive
for Work a platform that even the most privacy-sensitive companies can feel
good about:
• Fine-grained sharing controls let administrators customize Drive and
determine who can see files, and who can edit or sync them.
• A new audit view reveals file activity: anyone moving, deleting or sharing
files within or outside the company.
• Automatic file encryption occurs the moment you press the “upload” but-
ton and persists in transit from your device to Google servers, between
Google data centers and also while data is at rest on Google servers.
• Built-in archiving and e-discovery with Google Apps Vault allows you to
retain, archive, search and export email, chats and any type of file stored
in Drive so you can meet compliance requirements.
• Enterprise-grade security and compliance certifications include a SSAE
16 / ISAE 3402 Type II, SOC 2-audit, ISO 27001 certification, adherence
to the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles, and support of industry-specific
requirements like HIPAA.
Flexible, secure and enterprise-ready file sharing is here. Learn more about
Google Drive for Work or subscribe to our YouTube Channel to discover
new tricks and tips on how to use Google Apps and Drive.
Securing corporate data in the cloudEran Feigenbaum is Director of Security for Google Apps for Work and shares how Google keeps corporate data secure
As the threats in the
external environment change,
Google is at the forefront of
preventing, responding and
anticipating. That’s one of the
great things about partnering
with Google: you have some
of the best minds in the world
working on those problems.”
— Todd PierceCIO, Genentech
You can work safer in the cloud.
Our world has changed. We used to have better
technology at work than at home, but today, most of us
have better tools at home than we do at work. Today’s
CIOs face this tension between their users’ desire for
freedom and their organizations’ need for more security.
But the cloud offers a solution. A good cloud provider
lets you access your data from anywhere on any device
in a secure manner.
Traditional environments cannot cope with the new speed, and this will
expose you to new threats. In the cloud, we get security feedback instantly
and can refine our protection in real time. Updates and security fixes are
installed automatically, eliminating patches, scheduled downtime and server
configuration.
Ultimately, the cloud is about providing you with technology so you don’t
have to build it yourself, and providing you expertise so you don’t have to
develop it yourself. And that’s how we approach security. At Google, more
than 450 security engineers, including some of the world’s foremost experts,
work around the clock to keep your data safe. Providing security has always
been a balancing act between what is needed and what you can afford. We
let you add more security in a way you can afford.
14GOOGLE FOR WORK
15GOOGLE FOR WORK
Google’s cloud secures your data
Google has control over the entire technology stack,
starting with the data encrypted on the hard drive in our
datacenter all the way to the operating system of the de-
vice you hold in your palm. We even have our own trans-
oceanic fiber network connecting data centers around
the world, which improves security and reliability.
Not only is our security built into how we store and communicate the data,
but really, security is at every level of our system. We have built a series of
defenses in the depth of our systems to create a maze for the intruder —
advanced safeguards like 2-step verification, encryption and specialized
servers to protect your data at every level.
As a business customer, you only pay for the services used, but you benefit
from Google’s entire security infrastructure and security experience. Be-
cause of our size and position we are faced with the most unique threats,
from sharks attacking our undersea cables to governments trying to ac-
cess our systems. We learn every day from these threats, and have built a
unique expertise. We even engage the security research community to test
our systems with a vulnerability reward program and an open source patch
reward program.
By going Google, we
gained reliability and security
compared to our prior
configuration, which required
extensive upkeep, upgrades
and patches.”
–Bill OatesCIO, City of Boston
City of Boston
LEARN MORE ABOUT GOOGLE’S VULNERABILITY
REWARD PROGRAM »
Advanced safeguards like
2-step verification, encryption
and specialized servers to
protect your data at every level.
16GOOGLE FOR WORK
You can count on Google to protect your privacy
Google Apps for Work and Google Apps have a different
approach to advertising. Google does not collect or use
Google Apps for Work data for advertising purposes, and
there are no ads in Google Apps. We are not scanning
any of your Gmail, Docs, Slides or Spreadsheets — or any
data processes — on the Geo or Google Cloud platform
for advertising.
Beyond protecting your data with the best technology, we do everything that
we can to protect your data from third-party requests. If for some reason a
third-party wants to access your data, our policy is to notify you so you can
determine how to respond. We scrutinize all requests to make sure they
are valid, and offer no access to customer data without valid legal process
or customer consent. When the law prevented us from being completely
transparent, we challenged it. We recently won a case against FISA (Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court), which was unlawfully preventing us and
other technology providers from sharing the number of requests we were
receiving for access to customer data.
In any case, because it’s your data, you
should know what happens with it. We
have been the first ones to publish the list
of third-party requests we receive to inform
the public about all requests by govern-
ment agencies for user data.
We’re fighting for users from both sides.
First, our systems are already among the
most secure in the world — and our se-
curity experts are continually creating ways to make them even stronger.
Second, we are pushing back against any unfair government requests
for user data, and we are very active in helping reform these government
surveillance processes.
Learn more about the Google approach.
Google’s technology
makes it very easy to do
things in a secure way, so
our people do things in more
secure ways.”
–Damon ReesCIO, Woolworths
In any case,
because it’s your
data, you should
know what
happens with it.
As a consumer product marketing company, ScottsMira-
cle-Gro relies on trade promotion spots to get customer
attention. Sales associates use these promotions in their
negotiations with large retailers, such as Home Depot or
Walmart, to get them to feature key products on promi-
nent shelf space.
Until recently, communication between the ScottsMiracle-Gro marketing and
sales departments was cumbersome. In an effort to better coordinate the
company’s 150 sales, marketing and finance associates, leaders realized
that transforming business practices was of the utmost importance.
For example, account managers often did
not have commercials available to show
store retailers, and there was a risk that
the on-air schedule could change without
giving the sales manager time to make
adjustments in stores. As Scott Hendrick,
SVP and CIO at ScottsMiracle-Gro, tells it,
Scotts first built a Trade Promotion Man-
agement (TPM) solution using Google App
Engine. About a year later, IT partnered with
sales leadership to build a CRM app for the sales force. After using the app
for about 5-6 months, sales asked IT if they could embed the TPM solution
into CRM app; it took just 2 weeks to make the requested update.
WATCH THE INTERVIEW WITH
SCOTTSMIRACLE-GRO SVP AND
CIO, SCOTT HENDRICK »
ScottsMiracle-Gro’s formula for transforming business
In an effort to better
coordinate the company’s
150 sales, marketing and
finance associates, leaders
realized that transforming
business practices was of
the utmost importance.
17GOOGLE FOR WORK
18GOOGLE FOR WORK
Because the low-cost TPM solution was built in the cloud, sales teams can
now pull up every trade promotion in their region. Radio, TV, print, audio, vid-
eo — it’s all right there: all the content, all the schedules. If it’s an early spring
in Minneapolis, and marketing adjusts the promotions, that account manag-
er is updated instantly.
Before TPM, Hendrick’s team evaluated a few multi-million dollar standalone
packages. “Frankly, they were way over-featured for us,” he says. “So we de-
veloped just the parts we really needed with Google tools, and implemented
them at a fraction of the cost.”
ScottsMiracle-Gro has also seen organic adoption and satisfaction when
rolling out Google Apps for Work across the company. Most people were
already familiar with Gmail, Docs and Drive, so collaboration happened
naturally with teams of associates working in the same document instead of
saving different versions on the server.
“Google tools sell themselves within the organization”, says Hendrick. At last
count, the company had more than half a million documents in Google Drive.
“As human beings, we watch each other. In a technology context, we start
asking, ‘Hey, how’d you do that?’ And it leads to success breeding success,
which sets the stage for continuous improvement.”
To hear Hendrick tell it, transforming business has never been easier. “We
continue to build additional solutions using Google App Engine and Google
Apps to connect processes across various parts of the organization, helping
break down the silos that traditionally lead to inefficiencies. For ScottsMira-
cle-Gro, those synergies mean low cost solutions that are relatively quick to
implement, and that’s having a company-wide effect.”
View the Atmosphere Live interview with
ScottsMiracle-Gro SVP and CIO Scott
Hendrick, and see how you can put Google
Cloud Platform and Google Drive to work
for your business.
We continue to build additional solu-
tions using Google App Engine and Google
Apps to connect processes across various
parts of the organization...”
— Scott HendrickSVP & CIO, ScottsMiracle-Gro
Google tools sell
themselves within the
organization”, says Hendrick.
There’s sound reasoning behind the old adage, “Hope for
the best. Prepare for the worst.” We can’t always prevent
crises, and we certainly can’t control the weather. But
through collaboration, planning for the unexpected and
having tools in place to move quickly when emergencies
happen, we can minimize costs and casualties.
When massive flooding struck Colorado last fall, water covered the entire
front range, causing more than $3.3 billion in property damage and $556
million in economic loss. More than 18,000 people were evacuated and more
than 16,000 homes were damaged, with at least 1,850 of them completely
destroyed. According to NBC’s Denver affiliate 9NEWS1, the disaster affected
17 counties. Those residents — and their concerned families — needed
reliable information fast.
So Brandon Williams, director of IT for the State of Colorado, and his team
were handed a tall order: build a comprehensive, easily updatable disas-
ter-assistance website capable of helping citizens find the safest route out
of flooded areas, locate shelter and connect with loved ones. The kicker: It
needed to launch immediately.
To build Colorado United, Williams and his team got a little
help from Google.
Collaborating When It Counts: How Colorado Weathered the Storm
What’s extraordinary is
that we did this in less than
24 hours, at little cost and —
for the first time — integrated
real-time feeds of emergency-
management information
from local, state and federal
agencies...
The bottom line is that we did what all
of us want to do: be agile and respon-
sive. And we did it all with Google tools.”
— Brandon WilliamsIT Director, State of Colorado
19GOOGLE FOR WORK
19NEWS, NBC affiliate in Denver, CO.
http://www.9news.com/news/article/355407/339/Rebuild-likely-to-take-more-than-a-year
20GOOGLE FOR WORK
Instead of the traditional model of
outsourcing website development, where
the partner owns the site and you’re
locked into maintenance fees, we now
own the code, can develop our content
and have a set of tools that are easy to use,
especially for non-technical people.
As a result, our agencies are starting to embrace the
idea that they can build on each other’s efforts and get
the systems they want. Today, we have more than 405
[State of Colorado] sites — internal and external — that
have been built using Google Sites.”
— Brandon WilliamsIT Director, State of Colorado
Collaborating on the flyThe State of Colorado didn’t have time to built the robust,
informative, real-time website its citizens needed from
scratch. But since the organization had already built and
paid for the code to create another Google cloud-powered
site — Tobacco Free Colorado — Williams’ team was able
to launch Colorado United using the same template, at no
additional cost.
During natural disasters or other emergency situations,
organizations need collaboration tools that let them prepare
and respond quickly, even when IT infrastructure require-
ments can be difficult to predict. This is when the cloud
becomes critical to an organization.
Cloud-based tools can provide government agencies and
businesses with a reliable platform to create, share and
publish their own information at scale — all within the
security of Google’s infrastructure. The result: Organizations
can generate comprehensive maps, apps and websites that
sustain IT outages and inform stakeholders on demand.
That’s why Williams’ team used Google Sites to build the
infrastructure for Colorado United and Google Maps to host
and serve the location data.
21GOOGLE FOR WORK
Mobilizing the troopsColorado United quickly became the go-to source not only for citizens deal-
ing with the flood, but also for the media and first responders who needed to
coordinate their efforts.
To collaborate during the crisis, state officials also used Google Hangouts to
share screens, edit documents and get things done quickly. The organization
still uses Hangouts to host question-and-answer sessions between citizens
and public health experts, and to deliver technical training to people at their
desks, rather than forcing them to drive for hours to a training site.
Williams says the success of Colorado United has changed his organiza-
tion’s culture to one that demands new technology instead of resisting it.
“Our work with Google has given us a litmus test that we apply to all new
technologies ... We want to know: Can it help us work together more effi-
ciently? ... This is what gets us excited, because in government, we’re at
our most productive when we have more time to serve people like you. Our
work with Google has made us more productive and cost-efficient, and is
transforming our culture into one where we’re really getting the best out of
technology for the people we serve.” — Brandon Williams
To learn more, watch our interview with Williams at Google’s Atmosphere
Live event. Plus, discover how to Prepare, Respond and Recover with
Google Maps for Work.
WATCH THE INTERVIEW WITH BRANDON WILLIAMS »
Our work with Google has made us more
productive and cost-efficient, and is transforming our
culture into one where we’re really getting the best
out of technology for the people we serve.”
— Brandon Williams